Unums as a general concept seem really interesting. I ordered the book, and may start a julia implementation (unless someone else gets there first). Unified integer and floating point with clear accuracy information could provide nice solutions for certain problems in finance and statistics. For example, I have a specialized solution to represent financial prices which have a fixed accuracy, but I want to be able to do floating point arithmetic on them. This requires lots of converting between int and float, rounding, etc. Unums may completely change those operations.
If anyone starts an implementation, please post the package link here so we don't duplicate efforts. On Sunday, July 26, 2015, Scott Jones <scott.paul.jo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 7:51:51 AM UTC-4, Job van der Zwan wrote: >> >> So on an impulse I got the ebook, and even for a physics dropout like me >> it's surprisingly engaging and accessible! There's some stuff in there that >> isn't mentioned in the online slides that might clarify the idea better. >> >> For example, floats already have a way to represent the largest >> representable number (maxreal) and positive infinity. Add a ubit gives you >> the following: >> >> - maxreal without ubit: largest rep. number >> - maxreal with ubit: interval between maxreal and infinity >> - infinity without ubit: infinity >> - infinity with ubit: the interval between... infinity and beyond? >> >> So what that gives you is a way to represent a number that is bigger than >> what you can represent, but not infinite (maxreal + ubit), and NaN >> (infinity + ubit). For negative numbers, just add sign bit. >> >> On Sunday, 26 July 2015 13:59:33 UTC+3, Scott Jones wrote: >>> >>> Yes, but I could add the information about "inexact" vs. "exact" and >>> keeping track of significant figures to my format as well, while still >>> storing many common values in just 1 byte (including Null, "", and markers >>> for binary and packed Unicode text). >> >> >> Well, at the very least it seems to inspire some ways you might improve >> your format! :) >> > > Yes, and I am interested in hearing about hardware support for the UNUM > format. > I'm also curious about how these ideas interact with decimal floating > point (which is what I'm more familiar with, because for the sorts of > operations important for the use cases I was concerned with, not having > rounding/conversion issues between decimal <-> binary floating point or > string <-> binary floating point was critical). > >
